ESPN Ends Grantland’s Four-Year Run

Grantland, the boutique website created by Bill Simmons, was shut down by ESPN on Friday, nine days after the company announced it would lay off 300 employees.

Its final lead article was about interim coaches like the Miami Dolphins’ Dan Campbell.

ESPN did not offer detailed reasons for its decision to immediately end the run of the four-year-old sports and culture website. But it said in a statement that “we have decided to direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise.”

Grantland established itself as a community of writers who were inclined to write exceptionally long pieces, often making themselves part of the story. Holly Anderson, a Grantland writer, said on Twitter on Friday that she once filed 1,000 words of fiction on Roger Federer’s deviled egg recipe, “and it went up without a comma changed.”

ESPN seems to have concluded that some of Grantland’s long articles could appear on espn.com and that it did not have much need for the site’s cultural coverage.

Grantland’s demise had its roots in the decision by John Skipper, ESPN’s president, not to renew Simmons’s contract last May. At the time, Skipper suggested that Grantland, where Simmons was editor in chief and where his columns and podcasts were posted, was not earning its keep as a small, if distinguished, part of the media giant’s overall business. Until then, Simmons was a powerful force within ESPN.

“It’s about what he wants to do, what value that creates, what we want to do together and deciding whether there was going to be a match,” Skipper said about his decision to move on without Simmons. “We decided ultimately there wouldn’t be.”

Simmons’s contract was paid off soon after and he left for HBO; several Grantland employees recently joined him there. Dan Fierman, the editorial director of the website who was a close ally of Simmons’s, has left to be a vice president of MTV News. The site had been run on an interim basis by Christopher Connelly.

One writer, Rembert Browne, left Grantland last week to join New York Magazine. Another, Wesley Morris, left last month to join The New York Times.

Bill Barnwell, another contributor, wrote on Twitter: “Got to work with warm, smart, wildly talented people who believed in me for five years. I’ve been the luckiest writer on earth.”

ESPN has two other boutique websites built around high-profile writers — FiveThirtyEight, the creation of the statistician Nate Silver, and The Undefeated, which did not have its launch after two years under its founding editor, Jason Whitlock, who has been dismissed. His replacement, Kevin Merida, was appointed last week.

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